Oakland
100° City at City Limits
Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Jackie Im‘s review of 100° City, a three-person show at City Limits Gallery in Oakland that “…seeks to challenge, to draw people into these messy conversations about anxiety, about the effects we have on the Earth.” Today is your last chance to see the exhibition, which features works by Jason Benson, Joel Dean, and Erin Jane Nelson. This article was originally published on May 5, 2015.
Joel Dean. Untitled, 2015; Solarbotics Photopopper Photovore V5.0, glass jar; 11 x 7 x 7 in. Courtesy of the Artist and City Limits, Oakland.
When I was a child, I remember having distinct feelings of anxiety about the environment. Coming of age during the time of Captain Planet, Ferngully, and the vaguely environmental video for Paula Abdul’s “Promise of a New Day,” the stomach-churning sense of fear and a realization that, as a child, I couldn’t do much to halt or reverse the effects of pollution is a sentiment that persists today. Of course, as an adult, those feeling are mixed with a kind of fatalism as the Earth hurdles toward some end. The drought in California is not helping. The calamitous blizzards on the East Coast aren’t helping either.
Such environmental anxieties pervade 100° City, a three-person exhibition by Jason Benson, Joel Dean, and Erin Jane Nelson at City Limits in Oakland. Entering the foyer of the gallery, you see the gallery’s windows and glass doors covered with black plastic and taped down with blue painter’s tape, looking like the exterior of a haunted house. The walls and floor of the gallery are lined with gray, papery fabric, veined in a way that reminded me both of the red weed that plagues Earth in Steven Spielberg’s telling of The War of the Worlds (2005) and of varicose veins. The immersive installation made the normally sunny gallery space feel dank and alien, disrupting the common gallery tropes of the white cube and the more recent Contemporary Art Daily chic of bright, even lighting. With a keen sense of display and through the works themselves, Benson, Dean, and Nelson have created an exhibition that prods at humanity’s place on Earth, what comes next, and what does “next” look like? “Will sinkholes form?”
